“They are so far in you unconscious.” He spoke with extreme gentleness, and Miriam looked uneasily ahead, wondering whether with this strange knowledge at her side she might be passing forward to some fresh sense of things that would change the English world for her. English prejudices. He saw them as clearly as he saw that she was not beautiful. And gently, as if they were charming as well as funny to him. Their removal would come; through a painless association. For a while she would remain as she was. But even seeing England from his point of view, was being changed; a little. The past, up to the last few moments, was a life she had lived without knowing that it was a life lived in special circumstances and from certain points of view. Now, perhaps moving away from it, these circumstances and points of view suddenly became a possession, full of fascinating interest. But she had lived blissfully. Something here and there in his talk _threatened_ happiness. He seemed to see people only as members of nations, grouped together with all their circumstances. Perhaps everything could be explained in this way.... All her meaning for him was her English heredity, a thing he seemed to think the finest luck in the world, and her free English environment, the result of it; things she had known nothing about till he came, smiling at her ignorance of them, and declaring the ignorance to be the best testimony .... that was it; he gave her her nationality and surroundings, the fact of being England to him made everything easy. There was no need to do or be anything, individual. It was too easy. It must be demoralising .... just sitting there basking in being English.... Everything she did, everything that came to her in the outside world turned out to be demoralising .... too easy ... some _fraud_ in it..... But the pity she found herself suddenly feeling for all English people who had not intelligent foreign friends gave her courage to go on. Meanwhile there was an unsettled troublesome point. Something that could not be left. “Perhaps,” she said, “I daresay. But at any rate, I have an open mind. Do you think that the race is _sacred_, and has purposes, super-man you know what I mean, Nietzsche, and that individuals are fitted up with the instincts that keep them going, just to blind them to the fact that they don’t matter?” “If one must use these terms, the race is _certainly_ more sacred than the individual.” “Very well then; I know what I think. If the sacred race plays tricks on conscious human beings, using them for its own sacred purposes and giving them an unreal sense of mattering, I don’t care a button for the race and I’d rather kill myself than serve its purposes. Besides, the instincts of self preservation, and reproduction are _not_ the only human motives .... they are not human at all....” CHAPTER VII